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Sam Altman's 4 Strategies to Get Your First 100 Users

A prioritized framework for acquiring an early-stage startup's first 100 users.

From the Xiry library · Updated 3 October 2026

This framework ranks the top four user acquisition methods for early-stage founders from most effective to least effective. It emphasizes personal networks and targeted cold outreach over passive tactics like paid advertising. The core insight is to manually recruit initial users and validate real demand before attempting to scale.

How it works

Four strategies to acquire your first 100 users (ranked from best to worst):

  1. Email People You Already Know (Best):
  2. Reach out to classmates, friends, and former colleagues to ask them to become users/customers.
  3. Critical rule: If it is a paid product, always charge them. Friends want to be nice and do favors, which leads to overly polite, unhelpful feedback unless they commit real money.
  4. Targeted Cold Outreach:
  5. Research specific individuals who fit your ideal user profile and email them directly.
  6. Conversion rates are typically low (2–3%), requiring outreach at scale, but many people are receptive to helping early creators when approached politely.
  7. Community & Press Outreach (Social media, Hacker News, niche forums, PR):
  8. Must be sustainable rather than a single spike that fades away immediately.
  9. Press rarely covers a startup twice without new developments; turning press into an ongoing channel requires continuous creative stunts (e.g., Airbnb mailing collectible cereal boxes to journalists).
  10. Paid Ads (Worst):
  11. Buying Google or Facebook ads is the laziest, least impressive method for finding your first 100 users and is usually a bad idea before achieving product-market fit.

What it's for

  • Recruit initial beta testers and paying customers for a new product
  • Gather honest user feedback by charging personal connections
  • Plan early customer acquisition without spending money on paid advertising

Key points

  • Strategy 1: Email personal connections like friends, classmates, and former colleagues (charge them real money to ensure honest feedback)
  • Strategy 2: Conduct personalized cold outreach to specific target users expecting 2–3% conversion rates
  • Strategy 3: Engage communities and press with sustainable hooks rather than one-off launch spikes
  • Strategy 4: Avoid paid ads before product-market fit, as it masks underlying product flaws

Pricing

Free

Details

Type
Tip
Category
Business & Money
Topic
Startup Growth
Open source
No
Platforms
other
For
Early-stage founders and solo entrepreneurs launching a new product
Tags
startups, growth, customer acquisition, sales, distribution

Why it was saved

  • @foundedarchive, 25 September 2024: Disabuses founders of the myth that a product will magically take off virally, providing concrete, prioritized methods to actively recruit initial users.

Related

Updated